Panda Diplomacy
Day 161 / 365
The giant white panda is probably the cutest animal out there. It’s also my sister’s favorite animal, and to this day she jokingly asks me to bring her one as a pet. As silly as that sound, it’s tougher than you think to get a panda. The main reason? China owns all of them.
Yes, you read that right, China owns each and every Panda in the world. So how do zoos around the world have pandas?
The answer is that China loans it to them. And that too at the price of a million dollars per year, at a 10-year contract. Right now China has about 300 such Pandas in captivity, 50 of which it has given away.
China didn’t always charge money for it’s Pandas. It used to give them away to other countries as gifts, in a form of diplomacy known as Panda Diplomacy. When Richard Nixon, the US President at the time, visited China in 1972, China gifted him 2 Pandas. He returned the favor by sending over 2 musk oxen.
China’s pretty serious about keeping its monopoly over the Pandas as well. For instance, when it sent two pandas to Mexico, it was under the condition that if the two pandas had a baby while they were there, the baby would belong to China as well.
This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here
Yesterday’s blog —Learned Helplessness